Cornell Botanic Gardens


The Cornell Botanic Gardens, formerly known as the Cornell Plantations, is a botanical garden located adjacent to the Cornell University campus in Ithaca, New York. The Botanic Gardens proper consist of of botanical gardens and of the F.R. Newman Arboretum. The greater Botanic Gardens includes 40 different nature areas around Cornell and Ithaca, covering.
The origin of the Botanic Gardens dates back to Cornell's beginning in the mid-19th century and are part of the university's longtime interest in agriculture, forestry, and the natural sciences. The Botanic Gardens saw a major planting effort during the 1930s and assumed the name Cornell Plantations in 1944. Gardens and facilities have continually expanded, including a construction program at the start of the 21st century. The Botanic Gardens also maintains four gardens on Cornell's central campus. The Botanic Gardens offers three courses for academic credit, are used as a resource by other classes, host a number of informal lectures and tours, and have played a part in many scholarly papers., the Botanic Gardens had a $2.9 million annual operating budget. The name was changed to the current form in 2016.
The gardens specialize in trees and shrubs native to New York State. The themed herb garden is especially noted. The Botanic Gardens have been the subject of several books and films over the years, are open daily without charge, and have been recommended as a visitation site by a number of travel books and newspaper travel sections.

History

Prior to the founding of Cornell University, Ezra Cornell had a large farm on the East Hill above Ithaca, New York. As part of locating New York State's land-grant college in Ithaca, Cornell offered to donate the farm for use as a campus. In 1862, Cornell's first president, Andrew Dickson White, wrote a colleague that a great university should include a botanical garden: “It must have the best of Libraries – collections in different departments – Laboratory – Observatory – Botanical Garden perhaps…” At the university's opening ceremony in 1868, Louis Agassiz, an internationally known naturalist, remarked that no other area could compete with Cornell's surroundings in the opportunities offered for the study of natural history. From its inception, Cornell formed a reputation for creative means of research into the natural sciences, including the establishment of the pioneering College of Agriculture.
When the university built its first women's dormitory in 1875, it included a conservatory for growing plants and a specimen tree collection. Separately, the College of Veterinary Medicine started a specialized garden of plants that are poisonous to livestock. Cornell's farm included two deep gorges which flanked both sides of the early campus, and as the campus developed the gorges remained undeveloped and filled with native plants and wildlife. These became the start of the on-campus gardens and arboretum. A goal of creating an explicit arboretum was proposed in various university reports to trustees and other publications in 1877, 1883, 1908, and 1914.
Cornell's acquisition of off-campus forest land dates to 1898 and the founding of the New York State College of Forestry, which was the first forestry college in North America. As a part of establishing that school, Cornell acquired a demonstration forest near Saranac Lake in the Adirondack Mountains. The harvesting of trees from that forest drew heated opposition from neighboring land owners. Although political opposition caused Cornell to transfer the forest lands under the "forever wild" protection of the Adirondack Forest Preserve and to transfer Cornell's forestry education programs to its College of Agriculture, Cornell continued to acquire forest land remote from its main campus. In 1935, the decision to create an arboretum was finally made and the university established the Arboretum as a separate department. From 1935 to 1940, the federal government's Civilian Conservation Corps Camp SP 48 devoted 170 to 200 workers to planting trees, constructing dikes, and building trails in order to develop the Arboretum.
In 1944, Liberty Hyde Bailey, the Dean emeritus of the College of Agriculture and a horticulturalist highly regarded around the world, proposed the name Cornell Plantations for an expanded department in a report that reflected the work of a number of botany and horticulture professors. By 1948, the Plantations numbered and the first Director was named, John F. Cornman. During a 1949 broadcast on widely heard radio station WGY, Cornell emeritus professor Bristow Adams reflected upon the now five-year-old Plantations, and stated that the relationship between humans and things that grow were of utmost importance and that gardens, forests, and parks were everlasting collections that "have the care and trusteeships of generation after generation."
In the mid-1960s, the sculpture garden was constructed in the middle of the Arboretum as a project of the College of Architecture Art and Planning. By 1965, the Plantations consisted of. By 1970, the university was issuing a publication called The Cornell Plantations, which contained general articles on nature and environmental topics.
Beginning in the early 1970s, the Arboretum was upgraded with new roads and plantings funded by major gifts from oil industry figure Floyd R. Newman, and in 1982 the Arboretum was formally named in his honor.
During the 1980s, the Plantations experienced people stealing pines and firs for Christmas trees, with in some cases trees being taken that were worth several thousand dollars. A successful countermeasure created by Gerardo Sciarra at the Plantations was covering the trees with a harmless yet visually unpleasant "Ugly Mix" spray that included hydrated limestone, an anti-desiccant, and water. The technique was subsequently recommended to others worried about tree theft. In 2009, the Plantations suffered from a series of thefts of new or rare plants. A director at the Plantations, which had no security in place, said that the thieves must have been experienced horticulturalists and that the loss of research and species had been a demoralizing experience.
At the start of the 21st century, the Plantations embarked on a construction program which included: Arboretum Center, Horticultural Center, Mullestein Winter Garden, Ramin Administration Building, Rowley Carpenter Shop, Plant Production Facility, and Lewis Education Center. The new $7.5 million Brian C. Nevin Welcome Center was dedicated on October 28, 2010. Five years in the designing and building, the new facility was built to LEED gold standards and won a 2010 Award of Excellence from Canadian Architect magazine.
By the 2010s, the name Cornell Plantations was proving problematic, due to the association of the word with plantations in the American South and slavery in the United States. In 2015 the university's Black Students United organization demanded that Cornell "change the name of as soon as possible." The name was technically inaccurate as well, with plantations usually being a large-scale monocultural for commercial purposes, which this was not. A change of the name was under consideration for the better part of ten years, and then during 2014–16 there were focus groups, surveys, and polls taken to determine a favorite among nine possible different names for the Plantations, with the one chosen being that.

Current extent

F.R. Newman Arboretum

The F.R. Newman arboretum contains the following collections on :
; Chestnut Collection
; Conifer Collection
; Flowering Crabapple Collection
; Maple Collection
; Oak Collection
; Urban Tree Collection
; Walnut Collection
In addition, the arboretum features an extensive set of trails.

Botanical gardens

The botanical gardens specialize in trees and shrubs native to New York State. Overall, they contain a wide variety of ornamental, useful, and native plants on, arranged into gardens as follows:
;Container Gardens
;Deans Garden
;Decorative Arts Flower Garden
;Flowering Shrub and Ornamental Grass Garden
;Groundcover Garden
;Robison Herb Garden
;Heritage Vegetable Garden
;International Crop and Weed Garden
;Peony and Sun Perennial Garden
;Poisonous Plants Garden
;Rhododendron and Woodland Perennial Garden
;Rock Garden
;Wildflower Garden
;Winter Garden
;Woodland Streamside Garden

Nature areas

In addition to the gardens and arboretum, Cornell Botanic Gardens also manages an additional of biologically diverse natural areas, including bogs, fens, gorges, glens, meadows, and woodlands. These areas contain some of walking trails.
Typically the Plantations' Director has been funded as a professor of Horticulture in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, although 85 percent of the Plantations' budget has come from gifts. The Botanic Gardens continue to grow as it receives donations of environmentally sensitive land throughout New York State. , the Plantations had a $2.9 million annual operating budget.
In conjunction with the Department of Horticulture in the College of Agriculture, the Plantations has sponsored a Graduate Fellowship in Public Garden Leadership, where students earn a Master of Professional Studies degree after a four-semester program. The program of study requires an internship, selection of a particular topic of interest, and completion of an action project. Numerous scientific papers have been published that relate to work done at the Plantations or written by academics affiliated with the Plantations. The Plantations offers three courses for academic credit and a number of informal lectures and tours. Lab work is done at the Plantations by students taking other courses in various subjects, including geology courses in the interdisciplinary Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. Indeed, the greater Plantations has a connection of some kind to over a hundred courses at Cornell. The Plantations' Director has also been responsible for summer session courses at the Plantations aimed towards alumni and horticultural enthusiasts.
The Botanic Gardens operate side-by-side with Cornell's other programs. Cornell's academic buildings, which are owned by either the university or New York State, are on a landscaped campus with Plantations' gardens interspersed among them; the Plantations maintains four such gardens on Cornell's central campus. In addition, the College of Agriculture operates the Arnot Woods as a teaching forest, about southwest of Ithaca; it was given to the university in 1927. Near the Plantations, the College operates the Dilmun Hill Student Farm, which practices sustainable agriculture. The College operates Campus Area Farms that comprise 11 different farms and on campus and nearby. The difference between the Plantations and these other adjacent properties is that the Plantations are open to the public and are designed for both instruction as well as leisure, while the other properties are closed to the general public and focused upon teaching and research. Aside from physical proximity, the Plantations has affiliations with a number of Cornell academic departments.
In fact, during the latter part of the 20th century, public gardens attached to colleges and universities such as the Plantations became a popular trend, due to the beneficial effects they had on campus unity and recruitment of students, creating bonds with and outreach to the local community, and providing a basis for ongoing research as well as establishing a living museum.
The Plantations earned a relatively brief mention as a campus diversion in the 112-page Cornell Desk Book publication of 1972 aimed at incoming students. The Cornell Daily Sun listed it in 2010 as one of the natural wonders of the Cornell and Ithaca areas that students frequently went past, or lived near to, without noticing.
A 1973 survey of public arboreta by The New York Times listed the Plantations as one of the 17 best in the Eastern U.S. for educational value. The same paper characterized the Robison Herb Garden as "a student's living reference library" when it opened in 1974.
The 200-page volume The Cornell Plantations, written by Ralph S. Hosmer, was published by the university in 1947, shortly after the gardens were so named. A film Cornell Plantations was made during 1974–1975 and shown on PBS in Connecticut and elsewhere. In 1987, the Plantations released a VHS video entitled A Year in the Garden, which showed seasonal changes in the F. R. Newman Arboretum and along the trails. The New York Times called the effort "thin" and best suited for Cornell alumni. The university published the volume Cornell Plantations Path Guide: The Gardens, Gorges, Landscapes, and Lore of Cornell in 1995, and a 172-page second edition was published with a slightly altered title in 2002.
Working with the Newman's Own Foundation and the Center for Plant Conservation, the Plantations are trying to restore the regional population of the American globeflower. The Plantations are trying to use predatory beetles to control the spread of the hemlock wooly adelgid.

Events and visiting

The Plantations are open daily without charge from dawn to dusk. From the campus, one walks out Forest Home Drive past the College of Agriculture quadrangle; the nearest highway is New York State Route 366. Walk-up tours are offered twice a week. Adult volunteers also serve as stewards, tour guides and special event staff. Such docents are challenged by the large variety of plants; one joked in 2010 that, "The ones I don’t know the name of, I call Species Nocluesem."
The New York Times has recommended Cornell Plantations as a place to visit several times, calling it "a satisfying experience" in 1965, one of the sights of Cornell in 1979, a destination along a bicycling tour in 1985, "another free diversion" in 1989, and "one last outing before leaving " in 2002. The Boston Globe recommended the Plantations in 2000 as a "free to the public museum of living plants". In 2007, The Ithaca Journal referred to it as "one of the area's gems" and three years later said it "combines the best of walking with the eye appeal of well tended gardens". The Buffalo News portrayed the Plantations in 2010 as one of the places that made Cornell worth a vacation for non-students.
National Geographic's 1998 guide to the 300 best public gardens in North America has an entry for the Plantations.
The American Automobile Association's New York TourBook lists the Plantations as one of five arboreta and sixty gardens in the state; it does not get the "GEM" rating that one of the arboreta and ten of the gardens receive. Fodor's travel book for New York State lists the Plantations as an ordinary entry and says the gardens have "interesting cold-weather colors and textures". The Moon Handbooks volume for the state also lists it as a regular entry, without much commentary, as does the Great Destinations series The Finger Lakes Book. The Fun with the Family Upstate New York volume groups it with several other sights as "a real bargain" to explore for free. Most enthusiastic is the Frommer's travel guide for New York State, which rates the Plantations as a one-star sight, saying the Plantations is "a real find and well worth a visit for garden lovers or anyone seeking a bit of solace." The herb garden and knoll of rhododendrons come in for particular praise.
The Plantations provide a venue for a number of annual activities, including a "Fall In" festival, a celebration of Arbor Day and the Cornell Reunion 5 Mile Run. The Plantations is one of eight cultural and educational sites on the Ithaca Discovery Trail network.
The Friends of the Gorges is a Cornell student organization, supported by Cornell Plantations, that performs trail repair and maintenance and clean-ups.